Tag Archives: the tango of death

For an Administration which supposedly excels in its appreciation and manipulation of the media, the current presentation of Pres. Barack Obama’s activities is not only onerous but inexplicable.
All Europe and the civilized world is in mourning in sympathy with our ally Belgium. As blood is still being scraped off the walls of the Brussels airport waiting room and a nearby subway station, our president is going to baseball games and exhibiting his art of the tango.The fact that the terrorists explosions have blown dozens of victims into disintegration and that there are a substantial number of missing Americans among the unidentified intensifies the horror on both sides of the Atlantic.
The President has made what are seemingly pro forma brief statements about the depth of the tragedy and his intention to make the destruction of the terrorist network his highest priority in policymaking. But his insistence that the terrorist threat is not “existential” to U.S. security belies the seriousness with which his Administration treats the problem.
His social behavior on the current Latin American trip, which for important reasons of strategy he might be correct in not ending, is inexcusable. And the Administration has announced no real new political and military strategy to fulfill his promise to annihilate Daesh [ISIS or ISIL]. Administration claims that the terrorists have lost ground are obviously false with their continued attacks – now more than 175 – around the world and their growing amalgamation of terrorist groups in Africa and Asia.
A minimum action by the President might have been some new statement of coordinated policy and strategy within the North Atlantic Treaty Organizaation [NATO] iwith the psychological boost of its hesadquarters only a few thousand feet from the scene of the bombins. One has to harken back to how rapidly its members came to the U.S. assistance after 9/11 under Article 5 which pledges all of us to mutual defense. The comparison with Washington’s response to the growing European crisis is all too obvious.
The President’s partisans and supporters argue that the chief aim of the terrorists is to disrupt.our normal lives and purposeful routines. To lend unwarranted importance to their acts of violence would accomplish just that purpose, it’s argued.. That logic does not hold up. The incredible complexity of American life has, indeed, not been much affected by these terrorist episodes despite their horrendous psychological impact. But that does not mean their continuance will not eventually erode the American lifestyle. Especially if the reports of the growing number of returned Syrian jihadists and the squeleched plots uncovered by he FBI are taken into account.
They argue, too, that to put overly much significance to these events with the President’s attention would create a hysteria that might result in additional prejudice and even violence against our own Moslem minority. But the charge of Islamophobia against every effort to search out the origins of Islamic terrorism impedes an important part of the effort to eliminate it. The terrorists, after all, are not drawn from Southern Baptists or Mormons and their relation ship to some aspects of Islamic thought must be analyzed if it is to be defeated at the intellectual level..
Nor, again as the President’s apologists argue, is it counterproductive to pressure our Moslem allies in the Middle East and elsewhere to investigate the origins and pursue the terrorists. It is no secret that Saudi funds finance mosques in the U.S. and throughout the rest of the world that tolerate imams [religious] spokesmen who advocate religious hatred and even violence. Qatar, which has played all side of the complicated Middle East political scene, is a chief sponsor of the Moslem Brotherhood, the fountainhead of the Moslem terrorist sects. [That is despite its hosting one of the most important U.S. military bases in the region.] Reforming Moslems who want to eliminate terrorism – which after all has taken many more Moslem victims than non-Moslems – welcome our aid in examining and eliminating the aspects of their religion which breed the violence.
The President’s social actions could be called largely irrelevant to the current political scene and the struggle against Islamic terrorism [which the Administration, of course, still refuses to name]. But gestures and behavior are important aspects of the political scene. And Obama’s obtuseness is going to contribute to the difficulties of eliminating this worldwide scourge.
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